Jeff Bercovici
,
Forbes Staff
I cover technology with an emphasis on social and digital media.

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Correctly predicting the results of the presidential election in 50 out of 50 states makes Nate Silver look pretty smart -- unless you're a dug-in critic, in which case maybe you just think it makes him look pretty lucky.

That's the position QStar Group chairman Dean Chambers is taking, more or less. On his website UnSkewedPolls.com, Chambers has for weeks been predicting a win for Mitt Romney and taking swipes at Silver, who writes poll analysis for The New York Times on his Five Thirty-Eight blog, and the rest of the mainstream polling establishment.

Even in the cold light of the morning after, Chambers -- whose critiques made him a darling of the conservative blogosphere -- continues to think he basically had it right, up until a week ago, when the arrival of Hurricane Sandy on the eastern seaboard changed the dynamic of the campaign.

"What I think actually happened, and this will get glossed over because of the final result -- the race actually changed significantly," he says. "I'm not blaming the storm, but Hurricane Sandy took the election as a whole off the front pages for four to five days. After that, it got a lot closer. I do believe that a week ago, Romney was four to five points ahead in the popular vote."

Last week, Chambers was accusing Silver of using "voodoo statistics" and making worthless predictions, but he now says his beef was never with Silver himself. "My criticism was primarily with the polls," he says. "The only thing I thought was flawed with Nate Silver was that he was taking these polls at face value. Ultimately his final analysis was obviously based on polls that were far less skewed."

Chambers says he still doesn't understand the basis of Silver's predictions. "I was surprised when he moved Florida from Romney to Obama at the last minute," he says. "I thought at the time either he knew something no one else knew or he was smoking the wacky weed." (So what if he was? That's legal now in some states!)

He still believes his own reading of the poll data was more or less accurate. The problem was, he says, that it was incomplete. Specifically, it didn't predict Obama's huge advantage in get-out-the-vote success. "If you had told me two days ago that Obama was going to be plus-5 in turnout, I would have predicted an Obama win," he says. "You can make all the models you want, but they're not going to tell you what voters are going to do."

"The bottom line is that even though it did make the difference, I was only wrong on maybe three to four states, depending which way Florida goes," he adds. "That's still a pretty good batting average."